Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Memreeeeeeez...

Whoa. Going through some boxes this past weekend, and what did I come across but this:

Fujitsu laptop, first generation Pentium, running Windows95. I bought this in July or August of 1997, before I wrote my Master's Thesis. It weighs about 8 pounds. On the front, and I wish I'd gotten a picture of it, is a 3 1/2" floppy drive. Yeah. remember those?

What surprised me was that it booted up. The first time, it hung up and I had to set it up using skills I'd looooong forgotten, but after that it cranked right over and booted up normally. I ran through and played a couple games I hadn't seen in almost 20 years.

I find it interesting that I would have KILLED for this technology when I was in college. Word processing alone would have been worth every penny; it was either a typewriter or a borrowed 286 machine with Professional Write, a DOS-based program for word processing. Now it's a quaint relic, a curiosity, as our handheld phones are a thousand times more powerful. All in the time span of less than a generation...

I was almost tempted to plug it into the modem and see what happened when I got online with it. Would have messed with some sysadmin's head to see a Win95 machine logging into the system, I'll bet. Especially since it's running Windows Explorer version 4 or something like that... ;)

It's funny, too. I paid more for that laptop than we paid for our last three computers combined. Heck, I paid more for that laptop than I paid for a few cars. Combined. At the time, though, I had just started my first "real" job making real money; the Mrs. and I were living in a cheap apartment with paid-for cars; there was no reason not to spend a crazy amount of money on (at the time) cutting-edge electronics.

I think I'll hold onto it for 5-10 more years and see what it's worth as a collector's item...

13 comments:

"I think I'll hold onto it for 5-10 more years and see what it's worth as a collector's item..."

It will probably never be worth more than it is worth today. Which is zero. Or you have to pay to get rid of it. I don't think there is a market for such things.

It turns out there are things you literally can't give away. Or nobody wants. I had some old Nikon underwater stuff that didn't elicit a bid on Ebay, so, with that information in hand, I took it to the dump.

Try selling your old stuff on Ebay, and that, my friend IS the market.Photo Sphere

I concur with Libertyman. Unless you have a 20 year old computer that was owned by Steve Jobs, it's not a collectible. I'd suggest handing it off to an electronics recycler so they can extract useful metals from it.

That thing's old enough that it probably even has lead solder holding the chips.

the new kid sharing my office last year was cleaning out a cabinet, and found some old 3" disks. he brought them over to me and asked what they were :-) he had never seen computer disks. he kept asking why anyone would need disks to save files. it was a pretty funny afternoon, telling him about computers in the old days. I also explained "pay phones" to him. he had never heard of those either!-mrs doubletrouble

One of the few people that still have a use for older PCs. Seems there are applications out there that need old hardware (and software) and the interfaces they used like real parallel and serial ports. So it might be worth more than zero to someone and then again its getting rarer and harder to find old hardware.

I still have a working PDP-8f and PDP-11s both are approaching lifetimes rather than generations(1973 and 1979 manufacture dates!).

Man, you make me want to go down into the basement and dig the old 486 out of the boneyard and see if it will boot. I know there's still an active CDruid character on there. Cdruid being the color version of Druid, which itself is an unofficial variant of Moria, which was inspired by Rogue. Ask your parents kids. Well, if you parents were super Vax/Unix (holy crap a PC port!) RPG nerds back in the day...

Bring it to Cambridge when you visit Massachusetts again, where it can be reused by a hobbyist:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Eli-Heffron-Sons-ELI-Inc/189276278859

I can remember rummaging in Eli Hefrron's in the late '80's. You could pick up a used DEC PDP-11/24 at a decent price for the time, but the shop needed to make sure that you were not exporting it. Rumor was that Iran was using the PDP-11/24 to control anti-aircraft missile systems and the U.S. had embargoed sales of replacement parts.

Since you now have compatible equipment with certain agencies that shall remain nameless, you should be able to ha....um..... access their systems more easily....say...to get into Obamacare...yeah! That's it.....

They keep all that old equipment online as protection against high level hacking.

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